Tips to Improve Pinterest Engagement for Better Traffic Generation

March 23, 2018

Pinterest is a great place to find inspiration, whether recipes or DIY projects. However, many brands take advantage of the social giant’s over 170 million active users to share content and market their brand.

In order to be successful in connecting with your audience on Pinterest, you need to learn the right strategies and tactics so that you can drive the most engagement possible. Let’s dive into some tips to help you improve your brand’s engagement on Pinterest which will in turn help generate more traffic.

1. Organize Boards Related to Your Brand

One of the biggest mistakes a brand can make on Pinterest is keeping their Pins in random order. Take time to sort your Pins into boards with categories that are relatable to your audience. Having well-sorted and organized boards will help them stand out.

Also, take time to describe the boards accurately. Keep the names of these boards short and simple but to the point. The names and descriptions are vital, as they’ll assist the users in finding content.

Social Media Examiner is a great example of an account that keeps its boards neatly organized. They keep their pins in the correct categories, designed to catch the eye of their audience.

The same goes for the cover photos. Each board is allowed to have a cover image, which can help companies greatly in establishing a branding within the profile. Be sure to include 2-3 keywords as well as images that will stand out.

2. Repin Content from Other Accounts

By sharing content, you help establish an image that you’re not just about you. Similar to Facebook and Instagram, sharing content from other accounts is a great way to gain traction and engagement. Research suggests that over 80% of pins are repins

You can use Pinterest’s search bar to find content that your audience would engage with. You can then save that pin and choose which board you’d like the repin to be organized under.

Just make sure not to let this keep you from posting original content. You always want to make sure you’re creating original content. If we go based on the statistics that only 20% of the content is original, you want to be in that 20% that will get their posts repinned over and over again.

3. Use Long Images

With Pinterest, it’s all about the visuals. It’s important that your pins stand out in order to increase engagement. In general, on the web, tall images are easier to read because viewers prefer to scroll vertically than horizontally. So, taller images, containing more content, tend to get a lot more repins than shorter images.

A recent guest on the Oh So Pinteresting podcast, Vernon Ross, stated that by changing his images on Pinterest to taller graphics, his account’s traffic increased by over 15%!

Brand images without faces receive 23% more repins than those with faces.

Images with multiple dominant colors have 3x more repins than with a single dominant color.

4. Schedule Pins at Best Times

To optimize the engagement of your brand’s Pinterest posts, you need to make sure your audience can see your pins. Take some time to do research on the best times to post, specific to your account and schedule posts to go out at optimal times.

Although you can use Pinterest’s analytics to analyze when you’d get the best results, social media management tools, such as Social Report, can not only help you get the best data to optimize your posting but can also help you efficiently schedule posts to go out at those optimal times.

5. Use Rich Pins for More Info

If you’ve never heard of a Rich Pin, they are pins that allow you to include extra information right on the pin itself. There are 4 general types of Rich Pins which allow you to add info to specific content types, however there a few more that Pinterest has added:

Product Pins

Recipe Pins

Article Pins

App Pins

Movie Pins

Place Pins

Here is an example of a Movie Rich Pin. It shows more information on the movie itself, such as a rating from Rotten Tomatoes and cast details.

In this Recipe Rich Pin, you get an ingredient list as well as links to Whole Foods, where you can buy those ingredients.